Letting Go

Malick Bowens and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, 1985 © Universal Pictures Ltd.

I have this scene I'm writing in the current work-in-progress, and it's taking me a long time to complete. I'm not avoiding it, exactly, but I know I'm taking more time than I should, and only yesterday I realized it's because this is the last scene for a character I've come to really like.

No, I'm not killing him off, but it's still a goodbye.

I'm not good with goodbyes, whether real life or fictional, and in a film a farewell breaks my heart even more than a death, sometimes. (All I have to do is look at that picture above and I hear Malick Bowens's voice saying: "Then you must make this fire very big..." and I go all to pieces...)

The rational side of my brain knows this character needs to leave, needs to move on, so the story can move on as well. And I will get to see him again in revisions and rewrites, and when the book's finished and published I know I can visit him there in the pages whenever I want.

But the rational side of my brain isn't writing the book; that's the problem. And so I've been slowing down...finding small jobs that need doing...re-working a line here, a paragraph there...catching up on my research.

It won't work, of course. Either later today or tomorrow I'll write his last scene, and I'll probably cry (which is good for the book, in a way), and then that will be that.

But I never like saying goodbye to a character.

What about you? Do you have the same problem, as writers or readers? How well do you cope with goodbyes?

(Don't forget to come back Thursday, for Julie's post.)